In recent years, there has been an explosion of visual information including personal images and video. Personal cameras today are affordable and portable, and enable shooting video either as portable camcorder (e.g., Flip), pocket still camera and camera-phones (e.g., iPhone). This enhanced portability and increased ease of use enable people to shoot video casually at any occasion. This creates an exponential growth in the amount of generated personal video. Although people are shooting more and more video, there is not a matching increase in the amount of viewing or sharing of personal video
The internet video revolution has made a considerable impact in making video widely available to anyone. However, while large companies have grown by providing internet video services (e.g., YouTube, Hulu, Blinkx etc.) they provide a comprehensive solution only for viral video, TV-shows and movies. Personal video is left without any real comprehensive solution and thus viewing and sharing personal video is very limited. In contrast to other kinds of internet video, personal video is initially very raw and boring and thus not suitable for watching or sharing. In addition, personal video is completely unstructured, and thus can only be browsed primitively (manual forward-backward). Lastly, personal video does not contain meaningful meta-data and therefore cannot be searched. These problems, which create a poor user experience stand in contrast to other videos in the internet (e.g., viral video in YouTube), which can be searched, browsed and shared.
When compared to other kinds of internet video, personal video has an inherent problem that each personal video has a very small cycle of interest (few friends and family). As a result, the few viewers of each such video will not supply enough textual information and meta-data to enable textual mining engines (e.g., Google). Thus, while other forms of internet video gain a significant amount of textual meta-data from viewers, personal video remains raw and mostly non usable. In addition, personal video is mostly not edited and not produced, which creates huge files with boring content. As a result, besides being difficult to transmit, share and upload their required bandwidth and storage space is expensive relative to the minimal or zero amount of viewing they can generate.
There are many publications and patents involving partial solutions to the problem of browsing, searching and sharing personal video. For instance (Method and system for searching graphic images and videos n.d.) provides a method and system for searching in images and video. In (System and method for adaptive video fast forward using scene generative models n.d.) a method and system are presented for adaptive fast forward in video using a specific approach. The work in (Analysis of Video Footage n.d.) presents a method for extracting segments of interest from video, which are useful for a table of contents. The paper in (Emiliano Acosta and Luis Tones and Alberto Albiol and Edward Delp 2002) presents an approach for utilizing face detection and recognition for video indexing. The paper in (Oren Boiman and Eli Shechtman and Michal Irani 2008) presents an approach for classifying images. There are many other works dealing each with specific aspects of the problem discussed above. While there are many partial, ad hoc solutions to the problem of browsing, searching and sharing of personal video there is no single unified solution for handling this problem. Due to the magnitude of the problem and the large number of required modules, any practical system for solving this problem, which uses many ad hoc solutions, would be extremely complicated, inflexible and not scalable. However, partial solutions to this problem are inadequate: For instance, without being able to automatically edit and produce personal video, users would not be interested to share the raw footage, which eliminates one of the main drivers for using personal video. Without searching capabilities, and considering the exponential increase in personal video data, users will not be able to locate interesting parts in their personal media. Similarly, without browsing capabilities inside video and between related video users will not be able to explore their vast personal video library. Therefore, although partial solutions for the problems discussed above exist for more than 20 years, it is hard to point on a single usable system for browsing, searching and sharing personal video. This lack of suitable solutions explains the relatively tiny fraction of personal video, which is actually shared in the Internet.